<p>We have a house on a lake and two lab mix dogs who love to swim. Unfortunately, they also like to leave the lakefront in the backyard and roam the neighborhood. We’d like to restrict them to the backyard but still allow them to go in the water.</p>
<p>Since the in-ground wire needs to make a loop, you typically run it around the periphery of the enclosed area with the house inside the loop so that dogs don’t have to get shocked to enter the enclosed area. However in our case, that would close off the lake to them. I’d like for the in-ground wire to approximate the effect of a hypothetical linear fence that would run laterally from each side of the house to the waterfront.</p>
<p>The exit out the back of our house is via a deck that’s 7’ in the air. Could I run the wire in a long, skinny loop 100’ long and one foot wide along the back of the house and have the dogs not be shocked crossing it from the back porch since they’d be 7’ above it, or would the shock still be transmitted regardless of the height?</p>
<p>You should probably check with the manufacturer/installer of the fence to be sure. The question I’d have, in addition to yours, is what will prevent them, once in the water, from exiting the water onto your neighbor’s property? Oh, and the other question would be whether or not they can wear the special collars into the water. Are they waterproof?</p>
<p>Yeah, I would check with the fence manufacturer. In both of my last two properties they installed a double loop in a sort of “C” shape (sort of how a rubber band would look if you took it out of the box and bent it, doubled, into a shape) to allow them to be able to cross what would be the shock line otherwise. I can’t exactly explain it but it has worked for us.</p>
<p>I think you MIGHT be ok with the 7’ height. We have a similar “fence” and the wire goes along the ceiling of our basement (or just a foot or so under our main floor) in order to make the loop. As long as we don’t crank it all the way up, our dog is fine. But if we do crank it up, she gets zapped all over the place… you will just need to play with the settings you need.</p>
<p>Alwaysamom has a point about wearing the collars in the water and about the dogs getting out on the other property. I have a feeling, though, that they’d learn quickly to get out of the water between your property lines…You do need to do some training with visual aids (little flags, usually) that you gradually remove…</p>
<p>It’s true that the dogs could go in the water and come out on a neighbor’s property but we have a fairly long waterfront and where they tend to enter that water isn’t near either end, so I hope they wouldn’t learn to do that. The question about how waterproof the collar is is a good one. Sally, I think our problem is that we can’t do a C-shape with the opening at the house; it’d have to be more like parentheses-shaped. Hmmm - I guess you could do that with two separate systems, huh?</p>
<p>It would depend on how high you turn the invisible fence strength up for the dog to feel it 7’ above the wire. We have a lake house, too, with a very large beach area. We have the invisible fence wire running in the water out as far as the end of our docks (two docks quite a distance apart) but not past the dock ends so they won’t swim out to passing boats. It’s been working like a charm for 10+ years.</p>
<p>We have an Invisible Fence and I can carry the dog across the Magic Line of Zap and she doesn’t feel it. In fact, she won’t go anywhere near that line. I don’t think ours is turned up to full blast, as she is fairly timid and not the sort to test her boundaries. I’d check with whoever installed your line to be sure.</p>
<p>When you train the invisible fence, you train the recognition of the location of the fence using flags (the small ones on wires) to indicate the fence line. You could easily train the dogs that the fence line goes out into the water and you wouldn’t need to run it all the way around the property… at least, it would work if your dogs are the type that don’t constantly test the limits.</p>
<p>Interesting. Learn something new this morning. I will try and walk the collar out later and hold it up and see if it beeps. I’m like the dog, I don’t want to get zapped.</p>
<p>I would say the dog will hear the beep from the deck. Might not zap the dog, but it will hear the beep and therefore be too close to the fence line.</p>
<p>We have Invisible Fence and our dog can ride in the car and not get zapped. I always thought it had something to do with the rubber tires acting as insulation…Had a bit of a problem recently, though. A neighbor was walking in the neighborhood and, in an effort to keep the dog from barking, I picked it up. Well, the friendly neighbor wanted to pet my dog…I obliged and stepped toward the neighbor, got too close to the fence line and zapped the dog! Neighbor and I felt terrible that we’d duped the dog into getting zapped when all it wanted was to ‘speak’ in a friendly way to the neighbor!</p>
<p>We always take the zapper collar off before going for a walk and have trained the dog to wait for us to carry her across the line—It’s never OK for her to cross it on her own.</p>
<p>Easy to do, but a smart dog might learn he can swim out around the boundary. I have the Innotek Contain-n-Train which includes a handheld remote. We also have small zone boundary discs for our table and pantry. Pig-headed, poorly behaved rescue mutt.</p>
<p>The controller connected to the wire has adjustable strength - I set mine for about 3’.</p>
<p>Interestingly, if you park a car above the ingroud wire, a dog will get shocked anywhere near the outside of the car. It acts like an antenna, rebroadcasting the signal.</p>
<p>You can set your boundary wire’s “hot zone” to be a range of distances. If your deck is 7’ off the ground, then you’ll have lots of room to define where the warning beep sounds in relation to the zap (wire). For our Lab, we have 2’ from warning to zap. </p>
<p>We don’t have a pool, but our installer said the collars are designed to be water proof. Batman wears his electric collar in the sprinkler all the time. Never had an issue.</p>
<p>Our dogs will sometimes hear a beep in our master bedroom or bathroom if they go too close to the exterior wall. The fence line passes about 2 feet from the corner of the house. In general, the installer told us the field is 3-6 feet to either side of the wire. </p>
<p>I’m not sure I understand your proposed configuration - can you compare it to a U or an R or something?</p>
<p>Here are some layouts that include lakefront options:</p>
<p>If you can lay the wire over a seawall and into the lake, then I don’t see that we have a problem! Do you suppose that you have to anchor it to the lake bottom, or would it be sufficient to go out in a kayak and just lay it over the side to sink to the bottom?</p>
<p>They also make wire free units. It’s basically the same process without the hassle of buring that wire. It costs about $300 and $50 for each additional collar.</p>
<p>One caveat, the invisible fence doesn’t always work so well with large dogs. Especially smart ones with high prey drive :)</p>
<p>We actually looped our wire in the lake by having someone using SCUBA equipment (my brother-in-law) do it for us to make sure it was away from intake lines, boat hoist lines, etc. It is “anchored” down in a several places. You will not have a problem. We have labs and it works great.</p>